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A fascinating story in the New York Timesabout schooling in India has a few things to teach American educators; mainly, that the poor really do want a good education. (I have had extended discussions with colleagues about the question of educating the poor (see here, here, and here) and Kathleen Porter Magee’s The “Poverty Matters” Trap is a must-read for anyone investigating the subject.)

As it turns out, public schools in India, like many in the U.S., are apparently lousy – “in many states,” write Vikas Bajaj and Jim Yardley about India, “government education is in severe disarray, with teachers often failing to show up.” But unlike the U.S., where charter schools and vouchers have begun to offer alternatives, In India the poor have turned to a network of private schools to educate their children. It is much as James Tooley described it in a 2005 story in Education Next (and his subsequent book, The Beautiful Tree), recounting amazing stories from around the world:

[T]he poor have found remarkably innovative ways of helping themselves, educationally, and in some of the most destitute places on earth have managed to nurture a large and growing industry of private schools for themselves.

The controversy over the recent New York Timesfront-page slam of K12 Inc. was ostensibly about the company’s inability to deliver online education (see CEO Ron Packard’s reply here), but one of the more interesting parts of the ensuing debate was not about computers and education but about delivering education for profit – which is what Packard’s company does. (Full disclosure: I have done some editing work for K12.)

This morning Walt Gardner, who writes the Reality Check blog for Education Week, penned a letter to the Times editor that seems to sum up the anti-profit school of thought pretty well:

Agora Cyber Charter School [the K12 school that was the Times’ whipping post] serves as an instructive case study of what happens when schools are run like businesses. The profit motive always assures that the education of students takes a back seat to the enrichment of investors.

Nevertheless, free market advocates have managed to exploit the frustration and anger felt by taxpayers over the glacial progress of traditional public schools to advance their agenda. In the end, it will become clear that it’s impossible to provide a quality education and show a profit at the same time.

This is a brief but concise compilation of some of the misguided beliefs about business and education, and it reinforces a working theory of mine: that many education establishmentarians lean far to the left on governance issues other than those affecting education. (See my post...

Last year I attempted to rank the top education stories of the year using Google (e.g. 2,200,672 results in 0.18 seconds versus 1,607,000 results in 0.12 seconds). It was fun, but it was bit too nuanced (algorithmically speaking) to work. (My top ten stories of the year, according to this measure, were: 1. Race to the Top, 2. Bullying, 3. Recession and public school, 4. Common Core Standards 5. New York Wins Race to the Top, 6. Parent Trigger, 7. Waiting for Superman, 8. Character Education, 9. PISA results 2010, 10. Arne Duncan.) So, this year, I simply Googled for “Education 2011” stories and found some good summaries of the year’s top education events—and Rick Hess’s predictions of next year’s important issues and trends. Without further ado:

This is a fascinating report from the National Center for Education Statistics that, says NCES, summarizes “important developments and trends in education using the latest available data. The report presents 50 indicators on the status and condition of education, in addition to a closer look at postsecondary education by institutional level and control. The indicators represent a consensus of professional judgment on the most significant national measures of the condition and progress of education for which accurate data are available.” Some of the important indicators, which you might call perennials, include:

Reading—Young Children’s Achievement and Classroom Experiences

Paying for College: Changes Between 1990 and 2000 for Full-Time Dependent Undergraduates

After I graduated from college, I took the summer off and backpacked through Europe because I figured that it might be the last time I could travel without time constraints (of course, I was right about this). Not being able to speak the native languages provided some funny and not-so-funny incidents. In any case, I am sure most of you have been in a situation where the discussion is hampered by the two people not speaking the same language. It can be frustrating at times and shows how simple things can become so complicated.

A few weeks ago, I described an education reform program I attended, Rethinking Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century, which was sponsored by the Fordham Institute. The presenters were for the most part academics with impressive credentials. For those who have been part of public education for a while, some of these concepts may just turn your world upside down. That is because they are seriously considering “rethinking” education, not just tweaking it.

Most of you know that New Jersey’s commissioner and governor both want to change teacher tenure and teacher evaluations, as well...

Okay, it's not exactly what Rupert might condone, but since he and his crew are preoccupied and because our News Nuggets shop has plenty to do, I offer some education highlights from my weekend reading:

Charter Fights Move to the Suburbs Winnie Hu had a front-page story in the Sunday New York Times documenting a small trend in the charter movement to open more of the independent public schools in suburbs: about one in five of the nation's 5,000 charters are now in the ?burbs.? Not surprisingly, the story raises some existential questions about public education. ?Mike calls attention to the article in his Myth of the ?good? school post this morning, pointing out that ?One person's `good school' is another person's `bad fit.'? ?But there is also a ?financial question here, which is whether we can afford a good school, or even a good fit, for everyone. Is the computer the answer? Just as we citizens and taxpayers pool our resources to build common roads and ?provide for the common defense,? our ?public school system? has traditionally supposed that we get better education by having common schools. Traditionally, that has meant a central location. But if we don't need bricks and mortar to educate, do we still need a there there?

Rocketship Takes Off One of the newest charter success stories, Palo-Alto-based Rocketship Education may provide some answers.? According to Vauhini Vara of the Wall Street Journal, the the four-year old organization, which operates...

This is indeed a bold consolidation of power. But the plan also calls for turning Indianapolis into a district of total choice, in which all schools would compete for students — a bold diffusion of power.

Terry Ryan said it well, praising The Mind Trust’s Indianapolis school reform plan, Creating Opportunity Schools, as a “bold and dramatic transformation of public education akin to what has taken place in New Orleans and New York City." And it's true that “the most controversial part of the reform plan,” as Terry writes, “calls for neutering the role of the current IPS [Indianapolis Public Schools] school board, while turning governance over to a new five member board appointed jointly by the mayor and the City-County Council.” This is indeed a bold consolidation of power. But the plan also calls for turning Indianapolis into a district of total choice, in which all schools would compete for students — a bold diffusion of power. By combining mayoral authority and parental choice, as Paul Peterson suggests in his masterful 2010 book Saving Schools, The Mind Trust proposal would create “a marriage made in heaven”:

Theoretically, the excellence movement’s two central thrusts — accountability and parental choice — are complementary strategies designed to enhance school quality: information supplied by an accountability system can be made available to parents, who can then make intelligent choices among schools.

But Peterson warns that "when choice and accountability are pursued simultaneously, they operate on a...

Ladd and Fiske’s essay was one of those broadsides that spreads through the teacher ranks like a brush fire. I received my email copy from one of our district’s veteran teachers, a hard-working, dedicated woman who rarely misses an opportunity to remind me that she and her colleagues would be doing a fine job were it not for unmotivated kids and their irresponsible parents. And Diane Ravitch weighed in, calling to mind, in tune with the season, the story of Scrooge and Tiny Tim, offering to “update this tale for today’s school reformers” by calling attention to Ladd and Fiske’s op-ed. (Ravitch says she uses Ladd’s Education and Poverty paper in her post.)

What I don’t understand in all of this is who exactly is claiming that class (or poverty or parents or kids) doesn’t matter? Ladd and Fiske spend most of their essay stating the obvious: that socio-economic circumstance matters to education outcomes....

First, on NPR recently, CNN host Fareed Zakaria said that the Founders were so “obsessed with the problem of absolute power” that they created an unworkable government. “The system in Washington is so unwieldy that in order to get everybody to agree, [it] would seem to take a miracle and would perhaps take decades.” Is that good or bad? (Checker and Mike suggest that, as far as education governance goes, we’ve got to return more powers to the states.) On the same NPR show, former Congressman Mickey Edwards argued that the problem is not the Constitution – and the governance structure it created – but the party system. Sure, you can create an efficient government, like China, said Edwards, “the people just get in the way.” He continued: “Well I think that’s nonsense. We don’t need to change to a system that gives more power to the top…What you want is more power in the people. You have to figure out what’s denying them that power, whether it’s the political primary system [or] whether it’s the redistricting system; figure out what the problems are...

It wasn’t considered one of the top five moments of Saturday’s Republican presidential debate, according to the New York Times, but it should have been. After Romney attacked Gingrich for his Harvard proposal to put poor kids to work as school janitors (see my post last week) the new GOP front-runner, having taken some hits for his earlier comments (see my friend, Bronx teacher Mark Anderson), proves himself an able barometer of public opinion, dropping the kids-as-janitors idea but not losing his direction:

Kids ought to be allowed to work parttime in school, particularly in the poorest neighborhoods, both because they could use the money — if you take one half of the New York janitors, who are unionized and are paid more than the teachers. An entry-level janitor is paid twice as much as an entry-level teacher. You take half the janitors, you could give lots of poor kids work experience in the cafeteria, the school library, in the front office and a lot of different things. I’ll stay by the idea that young people ought to learn how to work. Middle class kids do it routinely. We should give poor kids the same chance to pursue happiness.

While the firsttwo sessions of last Thursday’s Fordham-CAP Rethinking Education Governance conference explored problems posed by the way America governs education, the afternoon panels focused on potential solutions. In the third session, Michael Minstrom, Barry Rabe, Richard Walley, and Paul Manna attempted to draw lessons for education governance from other sectors and countries.

In the final segment, Checker moderated a discussion of big-picture governance reforms that featured Paul Hill, Kenneth Meier, Jon Schnur, and Paul Pastorek.

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Adjunct Fellow

Peter Meyer is an adjunct fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Since 1991, Meyer has focused his attentions on education reform in the United States, an interest joined while writing a profile of education reformer E.D. Hirsch for Life. Meyer subsequently helped found a charter school, served on his local Board of Education (twice) and, for the last eight years, has been an editor at Education Next.